he time-spirit, as an irresistible force which moulds men like
potters' clay, crowning those who discern and help it, but grinding to
powder all who resist its course. In reality there are always a hundred
time-spirits and tendencies competing for the mastery--some of them
violent, selfish, atheistic, or luxurious (as we see with our own eyes
to-day)--and the shrewdest judges are continually at fault as to which
of them is to be victorious, and recognised hereafter as the spirit of
the age.

This modern pretence that men are nothing, and streams of tendency are
all, is plainly a gospel of capitulations, of falsehood to one's private
convictions, and of servile obedience to the majority and the popular
cry. For, if individual men are nothing, what am I? If we are all
bubbles floating down a stream, it is folly to strive to breast the
current. Much practical baseness and servility is due to this base and
servile creed. And the cure for it is belief in another spirit than that
of the present age, trust in an inspiring God, who rescued a herd of
slaves and their fading convictions from the greatest nation upon earth
by matching one man, shrinking and reluctant yet obedient to his
mission, against Pharaoh and all the tendencies of the age.

And it is always so. God turns the scale of events by the vast weight of
a man, faithful and true, and sufficiently aware of Him to refuse, to
universal clamour, the surrender of his liberty or his religion. In
small matters, as in great, there is no man, faithful to a lonely duty
or conviction, understanding that to have discerned it is a gift and a
vocation, but makes the world better and stronger, and works out part
of the answer to that great prayer "Thy will be done."

We have seen already that the religion of the Hebrews in Egypt was
corrupted and in danger of being lost. To this process, however, there
must have been bright exceptions; and the mother of Moses bore witness,
by her very name, to her fathers' God. The first syllable of Jochebed is
proof that the name of God, which became the keynote of the new
revelation, was not entirely new.

As yet the parents of Moses are not named; nor is there any allusion to
the close relationship which would have forbidden their union at a later
period (chap. vi. 20). And throughout all the story of his youth and
early manhood there is no mention whatever of God or of religion.
Elsewhere it is not so. The Epistle to the Hebrews declares tha